Protein drugs have changed the face of modern medicine, finding application in a variety of different diseases such a cancer, anemia, and neutropenia. As with any drugs, however, the need and desire for drugs having improved specificity and selectivity for their targets is of great interest, especially in developing second generation of protein drugs having known targets to which they bind.
In the realm of small molecule drugs, strategies have been developed to provide “prodrugs” of an active chemical entity. Such prodrugs are administered in a relatively inactive (or significantly less active) form. Once administered, the prodrug is metabolized in vivo into the active compound. Such prodrug strategies can provide for increased selectivity of the drug for its intended target. An example of this can be seen in many anti-cancer treatments, in which the reduction of adverse effects is always of paramount importance. Drugs used to target hypoxic cancer cells, through the use of redox-activation, utilize the large quantities of reductase enzyme present in the hypoxic cell to convert the drug into its cytotoxic form, essentially activating it. Since the prodrug has low cytotoxicity prior to this activation, there is a markedly decreased risk of damage to non-cancerous cells, thereby providing for reduced side-effects associated with the drug.
There is a need in the field for a strategy for providing features of a prodrug to protein-based therapeutics.